Elizabeth Jo
speaker
2,299 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 27 Mar
Elizabeth Jo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
На постолворс он.
In the nineteen sixties, it wasn't uncommon for postal workers to have multiple jobs.
By the time of Gino's interview, many postal workers were just above the poverty line.
Yet in early nineteen seventy, Congress proposed a bill that would give postal workers a five point four percent raise less than the rate of inflation.
This was the same Congress that had voted themselves a forty one percent raise the year before.
In New York City, postal workers in the largest branch of the National Letter Carriers Union demanded a strike.
But their union leaders refused.
One reason was it was actually illegal for postal workers to strike.
But the members took a vote and they decided to strike anyway.
And thus began on March eighteenth, that's right, nineteen seventy, the largest wildcat strike in American history.
A postal workers strike that began in New York and then spread to Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and other cities within days.
Now you have to remember this was 1970.
There's no internet, no online life as we know it today.
And so all of the ordinary things we all do online today pay bills, get paid, receive benefits, transact business completely happened through the mail, which in some cities had completely stopped.
So the Nixon administration went to court and a judge ordered the workers to stop.
But remember it was illegal for them to strike.
The postal workers ignored what the court said, and the stock market slid.
One trader on Wall Street said, I don't see how we're gonna operate without the mail.
And so on March twenty third, nineteen seventy, president Nixon addressed the public on TV.
And announced a national emergency.
Showing 1501–1520 of 2,299 · page 76 of 115
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